This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (https://www.elsevier.com/about/our-business/policies/article-withdrawal).
This article has been retracted at the request of the Lead Editor and Handling Editor after Dr Elisabeth Bik raised concerns about the article on PubPeer (https://pubpeer.com/publications/AEE9A6ACB6ADE2F85-CAAB4E278E712).
The article reports BDNF and beta-action western blots on CFA and CFAþSaline treated samples yet the respective panels look astonishingly similar. Furthermore the article reports various 20x and 40x magnification images of the tissues in Figure 7 for different treatment conditions. Various images of these are however taken from overlapping source images indicating that these were from the same sample.
When invited to respond to these allegations the authors provided supposedly corrected images which however still had the same underlying problem of parts of them being take from the same sample (though different ones compared to the published manuscript).
The manipulation and reuse of images and data in this way is a serious offense to the integrity of the scientific community and casts doubts on all the data, and accordingly also the conclusions based on that data, in this publication.
As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.